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I'm a mom of three, a professional accountant, and an amateur photographer and writer. I am not a marriage expert. But my husband and I take "Til death do us part" seriously, and here I'll be sharing how we keep our marriage strong while we both do that insane work-life juggle.

The lovely team over at Ladies Home Journal added me on Twitter last week. This was quite nice as you know I’m always looking for marriage articles to discuss for my Friday posts and I hadn’t thought to check out their site. Shortly thereafter they posted a link to one of their articles titled, “10 Creative Dates“. As someone who (ceaselessly) promotes making time for regular “Date Nights” and who is always trying to break out of same routine, the article caught my eye.

A few of my favorite ideas from the column:

A progressive dinner. Appetizers at one place, dinner at another place and dessert somewhere else. Different locations not only have different atmospheres, it would give your stomach a chance to digest before you assault it with more food.

Taking a class together. I’ve always thought that taking a cooking class would be fun - how much more so would it be if I had Honey for company?

Pretend you’re tourists. We live in an area that is vacation country for many people on the west side of the country. There are hundreds of attractions that we’ve never taken in, many of them free or by donation.

Going for a day hike. We live in an area lovingly referred to as “God’s country”. There are mountains, lakes and trails everywhere. What a great way to spend time together, enjoy nature and get some exercise to boot.

5 comments so far...

Those are great ideas! It’s easy to fall into the same ol routine; spicing things up is fun.

These aren’t wild or crazy ideas, but two that I like are:

-Having an indoor picnic. [Minnesota has a limited window for outside picnics haha]. Make dinner together, spread a blanket out on the living room floor, sprawl out, and watch X number of movies together.

-Drive. My husband and I sometimes like to take drives with no particular destination in mind. We’ll get a couple of pops and a few snacks, climb in the car with a full tank of gas and just head out. See where we end up. Lots of fun conversations and sing-a-longs to the radio.

So we used to do this in college. Go to your local gas station and buy $5.00 worth of $1.00 lottery tickets. From your winnings go to a different gas station and buy what more you can buy. Different gas station for each purchase. Jeff and I did this in college. Sometimes it took us an hour to burn through them and in the meantime we got to eat Mr. Goodbars, drink Welch’s grape juice and sing to our favorite tunes in the truck.

Pickup your favorite take-out and find a park with a tennis court. They are always well lit at night and rarely used (why is that?). ANYWAY…lay out your blanket and eat.

Paint a room together - or each other; or both.

Go shopping for a local family in need. Seriously, this feels awesome and gets you out of the zone that it is all about YOU. Together you can come up with some neat gifts. Be careful to set a budget. Leave it on their front step and hide. Anonymous gifting rocks the house.

Go to a movie, sit in the back, and make-out. I know, I know you can do this at home, but man…does it ever take you back to high school.

I second the “drive” from Laura. Within two hours I can get to other states and it is always fun to see what is right on the border.
“High-school dates” are fun too (mini (putt-putt ) golf anyone? Hanging at the mall? They can be hysterical fun as adults too.